Featuring History of Mystery/Detective Fiction and Other Literary Ramblings of Elizabeth Foxwell

Monday, November 13, 2006

Happy birthday, Vera Caspary.

Vera Caspary, author of famed noir novel Laura and a talented screenwriter (A Letter to Three Wives, 1949), was born on November 13, 1899. She died in 1987. New paperback editions of Laura and her novel Bedelia are available from Feminist Press, and a play version of Laura is now running through November 18th at Chatauqua Playhouse in Carmichael, CA (near Sacramento).

According to A. B. Emrys (see her article "Laura, Vera, and Wilkie" in Clues: A Journal of Detection, spring 2005), Caspary was influenced by Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and The Moonstone as she wrote first a screenplay treatment of Laura, then a full-fledged novel. Further information on Caspary may be found in her autobiography The Secrets of Grown-ups (McGraw-Hill, 1979).